Review: The Singing Detective

It's been years since I've seen Dennis Potter's original miniseries. I remember it fondly, but not in much detail. Perhaps that helped steer my viewing of Keith Gordon's reimagining of the film, but I couldn't help but be moved by Gordon's passionate, stirring film.

Gordon is a director I've long admired. He's also one of the few contemporary filmmakers currently batting 1000 with me. All of his films have been successes: The Chocolate War, A Midnight Clear, Mother Night, Waking the Dead and now, The Singing Detective.

Robert Downey, Jr. (perfectly cast in the best role of his career) is in top form as Dan Dark, a crime writer recovering in a hospital from a deadly skin disease. Throughout his stay, Dark imagines himself as a character in one of his novels, The Singing Detective. He also has paranoid daydreams about his wife (Robin Wright Penn) and wades through troubling memories of his childhood.

Brought in the picture is a psychiatrist, Dr. Gibbon (Mel Gibson, almost unrecognizable and amazingly acute in what is probably HIS best performance). Gradually, Dr. Gibbon helps Dark strip away the layers of emotional repression that have lead him to become a bitter, suspicious human being.

Gordon has done good by not over-choreographing the musical numbers. Each one is succinct and effective, with simple lip-synching and understated staging.

Despite its origins in the BBC miniseries (Potter wrote the script for the film before he died in 1994), Gordon's film remains in line with his previous films' sensibilities. Intensely personal, Gordon's oeuvre is distinctive in its tendencey towards intimate stories. Gordon has formidable visual panache, as well. The Singing Detective looks as good as anything he's done to date, and nearly as good as anything else released this year. The three "worlds" of The Singing Detective (Dark's reality in the hospital, the fiction of his novels, and the whirpool of his memories) are each presented with different visual interpretations. The hospital scenes are bright and crisply white. The book scenes rival any previous noir film in terms of mood and sustained tension. And the memories are a hazy, lucid combination of the preceding two.

Gordon (who is also a fine actor) remains one of American cinema's most important voices. The lack of critical support for the exceptional The Singing Detective is baffling, though owed in the majority, I'm sure, to most critics' dedication to the original. However, both Potter and Gordon have succeeded in reworking an immense tome of a film into a brief, but haunting exercise in successful repetition.

The Singing Detective, probably my favorite film of Gordon's career, will stand the test of time as an enormously inventive, moving and provocative experiment.

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